by Tarek Ali Hassan,Professor at Al Azhar University Cairo,Founding
Chairman of the National Cultural Center (new Cairo Opera)

The moment of first virginal consciousness opens up a gut knowledge that
is frequently the most spontaneous, the most penetrating and the most
true.

One of these inestimable moments in history, revealing in an
unadulterated form the real drama of human conscious life, took place
some ten thousand years ago along the borders of the river Nile. There
were undoubtedly parallel moments of virginal knowledge along fertile
banks of other great rivers populated by Homo Sapiens on mother earth.

Several thousand years before the life-to-death-to-life journey of Jesus
of Nazareth, Osiris dared to become the embodiment of uncorrupted human
nature and consequently chose to undergo to the full the passion drama
imposed upon uncorrupted human nature by fellow humans who had made
themselves into agents of a socio-political evolution hysterically
engaged in rationalising the rejection and the denial of the unique
human biological potential namely: intelligent creative nonviolent
survival. Homo Sapiens was being destroyed and replaced by Homo
Militaris distancing itself progressively from the greatest achievement
of human biological evolution namely the potential for nonviolent
interactive survival in harmony with all things internal and external.

The time and the environment 10,000 BCE, operated savagely against the
apparently impossible and suicidal Osirian knowledge, it emerged
repeatedly as impractical and Masochistic-suicidal. Very quickly and via
systematic violence and torture of mind boggling viciousness throughout
the ages, humans were to be inculcated systematically in the inevitable
naturalness of the unnatural: self preservation through unlimited
violence to all "other". They were inculcated to believe in the eternal
impossibility, madness and impracticality of the Osirian dream of
interactive nonviolence and consequently pursued a blood bespattered
history in supposed pursuit of rights, justice, prosperity and security
which were to remain incomprehensibly elusive. There were a few notable
exceptions in the twentieth century namely Ghandi and later Martin
-Luther King. As the pitch of mad violence rose and rose to
unprecedented heights and misguided leaders magnetised large chunks of
the human race to believe in peace, security and prosperity through
violence the whole perverse brainwashing was instiutionalised and rooted
with a vengeance. It should be noted that Ghandi and Martin Luther King
were murdered violently adding their own unique vibrations to the
eternally relevant Osiris drama. Bewildered blood splattered humanity
reached the end of the twentieth century without curing itself of the
savage denial of the Osirian message even though the arrogant anti-Osirians
had plunged the World into unimaginable horrors during two unprecedented
World Wars preceded and followed by a continuum of violence and
destruction against "other", the last tragic stage of which was fought
in the South with millions upon millions of innocent victims. Well known
to the Southerners as the third World War of fire, displacement, death
and destruction, yet in typical Euro-American egocentric stance called
in the North the "Cold" War pursuing the historically flawed assumption
that Western civilisation is the only Civilisation.(Article).

At the dawn of the twenty first century, Osirian dreamers,who had
somehow escaped the perception-perverting systematic physical and mental
brain-washing torture throughout the ages inculcating the need to submit
or be submitted or to destroy the "other", could see clearly that at
last all the fundamentals needed to realise a harmonious, just and
unthreatened nonviolent existence for mankind and for mother earth
became possible and were clearly within reach.
A truly deep tragedy is unfolding as at the height of our incredibly
promising century, ignorance and anti- Homo Sapiens venom and heritage
is releasing energies in support of the now unforgivable hegemony of the
Homo Militaris adaptation, helping to destroy yet again the interactive
win/win I and "other" Osirian vision.

Still the Osirian passion drama has been recorded and retained for
posterity by the great Physician/healer IMHOTEP. Thanks to the courage
of people like IMHOTEP, the drama of Osiris has survived incessant
attempts to falsify it and to justify and rationalise this
falsification. Knowingly and unconsciously the Osiris drama has remained
the generic seed of all relevant drama in human life, death and rebirth.
From the great Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonas of Sophocles to the
Bacchae of Euripides to the drama of Jesus of Nazareth to the great
dramas of the surviving Middle Eastern and Far Eastern religions that
had tried to transcend the "I" salvation through the merciless
destruction of all "Other"enshrined in the ruthless violence of the raw
Old Testament and the understanding-or rather the misunderstanding- of
its raw violence to "other" in the literal sense. Through all the
important milestones of human development we are witnessing variations
of the forbidden Osiris passion drama. The darker side of these
variations, is the blood bespattered history of human social evolution
towards supposed justice, prosperity and security for the "I" without
the "other" for the "US" without the "OTHERS". A path which, like Osiris
and Imhotep and all the great far-sighted witnesses to the drama taught:
salvation of "US" without the "other" is a blind alley leading to
cummulative injustice, deprivation,insecurity and violence.
These pages lead you along multi-channel multimedia material
uncovering the forbidden Osiris passion and its drama in poetry,
political analysis, music and aggressively challenging paintings that
certainly do not belong to the drawing room or bedroom, they belong in
public domain galleries designed to explore the deepest recesses of the
human subconsciouss for to understand our blood and torture besplattered
history and find avenues to causal resolutions:
You will gradually understand why the real Osiris Passion Drama had to
be hidden, forbidden and classified as you discover illuminations and
reflections emerging from deep antiquity onto our present with uncanny
accuracy; ARE WE CIVILISED? or has our faith that "Might is Right" never
changed from the days of the club to the days of the computerised
missile and the atomic bomb? Are we secure because we live in a just and
balanced environment or are we secure because we carry the biggest
stick/gun in a savagely disbalanced environment?
You will discover why and how human social evolution to cover-up and
hide its rabid denial of the God-given unique human potential for
Species successful non-violent harmonious co-existence with all things,
had to systematically destroy with unspeakable violence and elaborate
stratagems, anyone, anything. any evidence that bears witness to this
dramatically anti-socio-political-institution 'threatening' potential of
man.

Contrary to what we think and repeat parrot like, LOVE and harmony, are
dramatic threats to almost all socio-political institutions and to
almost all socio-political history. All will need to be re-written
through a lens of interactive analysis lit by universal and equal love
for all interactants. Oh what a THREAT to all!! It is this threat that
explains why we hate MOZART so deeply! We can not deny and amputate him
like the Hapsburgh empire attempted rabidly during his short life, but
we express our hate and denial in our obstinate refusal to take him
seriously and in "praising=denying"him as child-like, polished,
superficial, perfect!
The criminal shall no doubt be torn to pieces by all from all sides of
the elusive circle of truth.

Mozart like Osiris was ruthlessly destroyed by institutions and
priesthoods purporting to follow his 'divine' message, like-as Jesus was
-and is- systematically and ruthlessly destroyed by institutions and
priesthoods purporting to follow his divine message,Ghandi and
Martin-Luther King both met violent and cruel deaths perpetrated by
institutions for the social and divine 'good', absolutely certain of
their "goodness".

Osiris like Prometheus after him, loved the human race and sorrowed for
their infinite pains, suffering and folly.

He determined to enlighten them about their own forbidden potential,
thereby allowing them to refine their lives and discover the liberation
of agriculture and nonviolence as an alternative to the tribal hunter
killer existence prevailing before him.

He thus helped humans discover agriculture and uncover their own hidden
but limitless potential in the sciences and arts. He taught that the
essence of all this flowering was nonviolence. Nonviolence to self, to
others and to the environment.

The priesthood developing around Osiris and his teaching, gradually came
to find the living Osiris a menace and a threat. Everytime he came to
life impersonated in some son of man, he was captured, tortured and
killed by the very priests that puported to worship him. Finally he was
dismembered and the parts separated and hidden so far apart that they
would never come together.

Rejected and hated by the powers, in life, he was exalted and glorified,
dead and safely banished out of the real world, to the highest pinnacles
of adoration and worship.

The priests absolutely forbade enactment of the real Osiris drama and
invented a false drama instead. The Osirian drama of conscious life was
metamorphosed into a decoy story about the battle between good and evil
in which we the powerful and ruling "good" always triumph, while all
others are destroyed, enslaved, tortured and ground to a pulp.The circle
of deception was complete when the Roman Empire introduced organised
violence with a vengeance as the normal, and apparently highly
successful, way of life, leading to peace, glory, empire and infinite
riches to the privileged.Osiris and his conceptual twin Maat (essence of
justice) faded out of human consciousness into oblivion so did the
consciousness of the feminine component of creation.

In these pages, and in the text of the drama yet to be published, we
have the last link to the forbidden passion drama which comes back to us
in a dream as though transmitted by ancient Egypt's
greatest physician/philosopher/Architect, IMHOTEP.
That great benefactor of humanity, IMHOTEP, a God of healing in the
ancient world, was, according to the West's mass media propaganda
machine typically maligned as an evil spirit bent on the destruction of
civilisation in the blockbuster films " the Mummy" and the "return of
the Mummy".
Who is the protagonist of civilisation one wonders and which is the side
bent on sensless destruction?

The real IMHOTEP -radically different from the evil creation of
Hollywood's paranoid imagination- was amongst the very few who would
have had the courage and vision and knowledge to have this forbidden
drama enacted in the magnificent funerary complex at the step Pyramid in
Sakkara reversing all the win/lose values so deeply ingrained and
entrenched after the great success and glory of Rome and of Empire.
Full of symbolism relevant to our times. The twenty first
century?teetering on the verge of relapse into the hitherto catastrophic
ruthless win/lose values which spilt so much blood in the twentieth
century, hoping somehow for the miracle of a new/old Osirian interactive
win/win matrix which incorporates at its core the Osirian nonviolence
and the Osirian sanctification of life and of nature
After contributing to civilisation the greatest dramatic story of all
time, drama was imperceptibly but decisively driven out of the life,
culture and religion of Ancient Egypt . That banishment was so
decisive,so terrified, so venomous so intense, that it cast its awful
shadow down to the present and into the future of the whole World. While
drama ennobled man to seek flowering, interactive communication,
fulfillment and salvation in the present as well as in the afterlife,
without drama the hope of fulfillment and flowering was transplanted
totally into the after life. Without drama, the human imagination was to
be occupied with dreams of Utopia and nightmares of Hell to cover up the
inevitable poverty and sterility of their present life. Without osirian/mozartian/sophoclean
drama, mankind was to be deprived of the safety valves protecting
against the adoption of absoluteTruths in life. Without drama there can
be no living interactive pluralism and no integrative peace based on
harmony and communication, rather than on submission by force and or
fear .

If Osiris was the secret loved one in the hearts of men and women in
3000BC, he deserves to be a real loved one in 2001AD; in the open!
Osiris is one of the last calls for sanity. Pluralistic, interactive
non-violent harmony.

Understanding Osiris' real passion drama is key to us breaking out of
the terrible magnet imperceptibly and tragically pulling the twenty
first Century into the disastrous win/lose patterns of the twentieth
Century diagnosing "us" as absolute and unquestionable good and "other"
as absolute and unquestionable evil. A rare window of opportunity now
exists for the rebirth of civilisation based on nonviolent dynamic
interactive pluralism in a dedicated win/win matrix encompassing all the
global community, but will anyone listen?

The right to gain your genetic potential in a healthy growth-promoting
societal environment is one of the inalienable rights of human-beings of
either sex anywhere, everywhere..
This means recapturing the initiative about life's right to grow, about
health and about prevention.

Through interactive discovery of self and the world. With the help of
the expressive explorative arts especially music, painting, drama and
dance , human beings need to continuously discover and rediscover what
growth and what potential means to everyone at a given time and place.

It is a continuous interactive process through which they can re-orient
themselves as controllers and directors of the march of capital,
science, technology and application rather than being just passive
recipients and many times helpless and bewildered victims of a march
that has become more connected to clandestine dynamics of money and of
power rather than to life and to growth.

No wonder real people everywhere are becoming more and more disenchanted
with politics and political process. Somewhere people even in old
established democracies, realise that the real master is not their
voices and perceptions any more! The turnout in the 2001 British general
elections was the lowest ever.

The march of escalating speed, power and violence is not
people-connected and is certainly disconnected from the great Osirian
vision of life and of Earth, explored in the coming pages. We seem to be
in the grip of a counter Osirian momentum very well summarized in the
story of mad-cow disease!

In parallel with my commitment to Medicine and human health, and my work
in an NGO charity, the ZKH FOUNDATION for human development,helping to
empower the disempowered,I practice musical composition, painting and
drama and would like to share all with you.

THE ZKH FOUNDATION FOR HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

founded 1993 in honour of Zenab Kamel Hassan: A defiant Egyptian Moslem
Girl who defied everything to get access to an education at all, then to
get a University education which in the early twenties meant travelling
alone to London, joining Clapham High School to get the matriculation,
then joining London University, Bedford College to study Science and
duly graduate in Chemistry1929 to become the first Egyptian girl to
graduate in Science in modern times. Her story of constructive defiance
and struggle to set a different role model for Egyptian women and women
in the Islamic World is summerized in the foundation booklet (published
1996:"Responding to the Challenges of the twenty first century"). She
went on to fight her way into becoming the first woman to teach men
Chemistry in Cairo University! The progressive marginalisation and
disempowerment of like-minded and enlightened "rebels" represents a
fundamental fulcrum in the study of the mechanisms of relapse of the
extremely promising and developmental leap in the whole of the region as
led by Egypt after the 1919 revolution and its highly fertile
associations and offshoots. How was this great promise dismembered,
marginalised and disempowered with the rise of unitary totalitarianism
in politics and in thought/culture/religion, is worthy subject for
several doctoral theses? The Foundation believes that the key to
development is re-empowering the disempowered whether these are the
poorer, the younger, the non-attached or the feminine. The establishment
of dialogue with all "other" is yet another commitment.